News Category: Life at Grubhub

Voices of Grubhub: How Legal Supports Grubhub’s Business Strategy

To showcase different perspectives and give an inside look into Grubhub, we’re spotlighting leaders across the organization. For this edition, we caught up with Katie Armistead, Vice President of Legal & Deputy General Counsel.

The legal department serves as a critical business partner, helping enable the success of Grubhub’s strategy at every level of the organization. 

You have some tenure here at Grubhub. What was your trajectory like after law school?

Backing up a bit, I went to law school out East and made my way to the Midwest after graduating. My first job out of school was at Jones Day, a large international law firm. I spent three and a half years there before I moved in-house and joined Grubhub. My seven year anniversary was last week! And it’s funny, I’ve been here seven years and I feel like I’m at a new company every six months since there’s always a new initiative that’s important to Grubhub or a new legal risk which makes this job so fun yet challenging. My team is always having to stay up to date on business initiatives and what’s happening in the industry which keeps us constantly learning and evolving as legal professionals.

There’s a common misconception that legal teams can be a blocker to great ideas. How do you fight off that perception?

We consider ourselves real business partners and are here to support whatever the business needs. That’s been true since day one when we were a small but mighty team to today where we are a much larger function. Generally speaking, the legal team at companies can often get a bad reputation and is viewed as the “no” team more often than not. That’s not our goal or the team we want to be. I make sure that my team is part of every conversation from day one so that we can identify risks early on while learning about the opportunities an effort presents. 

It’s easy to call out what can go wrong, but identifying what can go right and help the business and our partners grow is equally important and something we place a lot of emphasis on. To do that, my team spends a lot of time building relationships with folks across the business to understand their priorities so we can best advise them and be viewed as a trusted partner.

The best analogy someone on my team said was that we are the pit team during a NASCAR race. When you’re watching NASCAR, you see the cars go around the track and then stop so that the pit team can come in and fix the car so it’s ready to race. That’s the legal team. We consider ourselves the pit team — we went to be helpers.  

Talk to me about work-life balance. As a lawyer and mom of two (almost three), how do you prioritize personal time and work and promote that within your team?

As a mom of a four-year-old and a two-year-old with another on the way, I have a lot going on in my life. Here’s my take: we all have other things that make us who we are outside of work, and when the team comes to work, we ask them to bring their full selves. We aren’t robots, so there’s no need to show up to work on Monday and immediately dive into contract negotiations. I want to hear about your weekend and the things you’ve been up to. Or, if you’ve been going through some challenges, I want you to know I’m here to support you. 

I’m a believer that a full personal life makes you a better lawyer, and I tell our lawyers that sometimes the best ideas I’ve had about our legal challenges have happened when I’m on a run or out to brunch with my girlfriends. 

What advice do you have for people who are pursuing a career in the legal field?

I hear a lot from more junior female attorneys and women in law school who want to know how they can get to where I’m at now. And I tell them all the same thing — work really hard and try to have some fun. The legal profession can be a lot of fun, but it has a bad reputation for being too hardworking or having too many naysayers which I mentioned earlier. You also need to work somewhere that aligns with your values.

One of the reasons I love Grubhub is because the people here are just so fabulous. Our leadership — specifically our chief legal officer, is an incredible leader and really champions junior lawyers. Loving the team you’re on makes coming to work every day fun and easy, and I would encourage people getting into the law profession to seek out law firms and companies that match their values and interests. You have to love what you do considering how much time you spend doing it.

You’re known within your team for having a lot of catchphrases. What are some of them?

Oh boy, there are a lot. Two of my favorites are “How many tacos did this cost us?” and “Lean into the chaos.”

 

Voices of Grubhub: Grubhub Corporate Accounts Continues to Set Industry Standard

To showcase different perspectives and give an inside look into Grubhub, we’re spotlighting leaders across the organization. For this edition, we caught up with Jeff Mirmelstein, Vice President of Corporate Accounts, to share some background on our corporate accounts function.

Building best-in-class products and services for campus and corporate clients is one of Grubhub’s focuses for the year. Our corporate accounts team partners with thousands of businesses across the country that use Grubhub to feed employees for company-wide lunches, team celebrations, virtual meetings, and everything in between.

The last few years have been interesting for the delivery industry, especially for corporate accounts. Tell us what the horizon has been like pre-COVID to post-COVID. 

COVID had an inverse impact on our team compared to the rest of Grubhub. Pre-COVID, most of our Corporate Accounts business was focused on in-office dining, including catering, scheduled team orders, or even late-night, weekend, and overtime meals. When people stopped going into offices, it was no surprise that our business initially declined. 

Interestingly, but also not surprisingly, COVID also presented a slew of different and unique use cases to serve clients and their employees in their homes, with things like team celebrations, webinars, virtual meetings, and virtual town halls. As people started to return to the office and we were able to leverage the use cases we built during COVID, our business rebounded and quickly returned to growth. While a large portion of our in-office business was paused in early 2020 due to Covid, we’ve more than rebounded. We’re now much larger than we were before the pandemic as we service clients’ in-office and at-home use cases.

Beyond COVID, you’ve seen the competitive landscape shift in corporate accounts as more players have entered the space. As a result, what has your team done differently? 

Over the last few years, we’ve seen new players aggressively enter the corporate accounts space. Our focus is always going to be solidifying Grubhub as the best meal perks provider for clients. It’s that simple. Companies need dedicated tools and services to meet their demands, and we’re constantly making updates and adding new features. We’ve increased our focus on Fortune 1000 companies and how we can be the best service provider to those large, sophisticated organizations. Our institutional knowledge of serving corporate accounts since 1999 has given us a significant advantage, so we know what they want and need to serve them best. 

Additionally, in the last few years, we’ve introduced a self-service product, allowing medium and small organizations to quickly sign up for a corporate account and start placing orders the same day. This frees up the enterprise team to spend more time building relationships with prospective clients and makes the onboarding process clearer and quicker for our SMB clients.

What are the key priorities your team is going after in 2024? 

Loyalty will continue to be a big one for us. We have our loyalty subscription program, Grubhub+, and we’re thinking through new ways about how it could be a complementary benefit for our Corporate clients.  

And as I mentioned earlier, we’re focused on maintaining our position as the platform of choice for businesses of all sizes. This includes large, complex accounts that require a more granular look into how their organization is spending, to a small, single-digit person office for their weekly lunches.

For more information on Grubhub Corporate Accounts, please visit here.